February 2010 Unreal Development Kit Beta Released

[Tami]

Epic Games, Inc. has released the February 2010 UDK Beta, an updated version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides uncompromised access to the award-winning game development toolset.

Epic is committed to providing the UDK community with regular software releases at no charge, and the latest beta is available now at www.udk.com/download.

An extensive list of new additions and improvements included with this version is available at:
[url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/BuildUpgradeNotesFeb2010General\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/BuildUpgrad...sFeb2010General[/url]

February 2010 Beta

New UDK Features and Tools
• New color picker
o Update in real time, e.g., change color and see level lighting update as you drag!
o Properly deal with HDR colors
o Capture from the entire screen – even your desktop!
o [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorPicker.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorPicker.html[/url]
• Screen door fades
o New screen door dissolve effect for fading primitives (SM3+ only)
o Actors can fade in/out based on their MaxDrawDistance
- Static meshes, ProcBuildings, Skeletal Meshes and SpeedTrees are supported
o Static Mesh LODs can and Massive LODs can cross-dissolve between each other
o To enable this feature:
- Set 'bAllowScreenDoorFade' to True in [Engine.Engine] .ini file
- Set 'bUsedWithScreenDoorFade' on materials that should fade
• New package backup system to prevent lost work due to a crash
• Snap to recovery feature for post process overrides allows you to choose a snap directly to the level pp settings instead of a gradual recovery
• Whole scene dynamic shadow for dominant directional lights around the camera which blends out to precomputed shadows based on distance

UDK Improvements
• Dramatically improved Navigation Mesh simplification
o 50-60% reduction in polygon counts, with corresponding 50-60% reduction in memory footprint
o Faster at runtime due to less nodes to traverse, etc.
o Makeup of mesh is much improved with edges that span obstacle to obstacle and provide more accurate width representation of the geometry
• Matinee improvements
o Multi-select support for Matinee groups and tracks
- Users can now copy and paste many tracks at once in Matinee
- Multiple Matinee groups can now be moved into a folder in a single action
o Curve Editor new feature: Movement axis locking
- Hold down the Shift key before dragging a key to lock to an axis
• Kismet improvements
o Added Kismet "And" gate
- Fires its output once, only after every linked input has fired at least once
o Ctrl + Enter now adds line breaks to Kismet comment boxes
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/KismetReference.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/KismetReference.html[/url]
• CameraAnim Improvements
o Greatly improved CameraAnim handling and blending of post-process values
• Static mesh LOD improvements
o Screendoor fade between static mesh LODs for supporting materials based on time
- Static meshes are forced down the dynamic rendering path while transitioning
- Static mesh dynamic rendering path now uses the same LOD heuristic as the static path
- Screendoor fade even works on dynamic shadows from the static mesh
• Necessary to avoid popping due to LODs shadowing each other
o Lightmap resolution is now halved for each static mesh LOD level
• Moving UTGame native code to UDKBase native package
• Volumes, static meshes and triggers now have more apparent collision hull wires

Optimizations, Upgrades, and Fixes
• Bink update fixes the #3 most common UDK crash
• SpeedTree applications upgrade from 5.0.0 to 5.0.2
o Fixes an incompatibility with tablet drivers
o Exports the G channel of normal maps correctly for use with UE3
o A few other minor fixes
• Static mesh component vertex color memory savings
o Painted vertex colors now use half as much memory
• Save System overhaul to unify map and content package code paths and enhance usability for content creators.

New UDK training videos from Eat3D
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Eat3D.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Eat3D.html[/url]

Updated UDN Documentation
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VisibilityCulling.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VisibilityCulling.html[/url]
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LitTranslucency.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LitTranslucency.html[/url]
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CustomLighting.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CustomLighting.html[/url]
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentCooking.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentCooking.html[/url]
• [url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentBlog.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentBlog.html[/url]

Additional documentation, code samples and more are available at the Unreal Developer Network (UDN):
[url=\"http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html\"]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html[/url]

UDK community links:
LinkedIn user group: www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2493123
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/UDK/183744733429